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oil giant Chevron accountable for its human rights
and environmental abuses in Ecuador

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Monday, December 30, 2013

Looking back on Chevron’s retaliatory RICO trial, it is
clear that the oil company’s lawyers were so terrified of some of their own
witnesses that they literally ordered them to stay away from court.

Remember Douglas Beltman and Ann Maest, the
scientific consultants for the rainforest indigenous and farmer communities in Ecuador that were devastated by
Chevron’s toxic dumping? Beltman and Maest helped the communities win
their historic judgment against Chevron in Ecuador’s courts. The judgment
recently was affirmed by Ecuador's Supreme Court.

Several months ago, desperate to evade a court order that it clean up its toxic mess, Chevron launched a public
relations offensive in the U.S. that claimed Beltman and Maest had “disavowed” their
work for the communities harmed by Chevron's pollution. In opening arguments in the RICO
case in October, Chevron lawyer Randy Mastro touted Beltman and Maest as key
witnesses against New York human rights lawyer Steven Donziger, the company’s
principal target.

So
why did Mastro and his team of 114 lawyers
at Gibson Dunn decide to bail on Beltman and Maest? And what does the
sudden disappearance of these witnesses tell us about the validity of
Chevron’s RICO case?

Mastro knew that under
cross-examination Beltman and Maest almost certainly would have delivered
damning testimony against Chevron. As far as the case is concerned, Chevron’s
failure to call these witnesses underscores yet again how weak the company’s
evidence is -- which is why Chevron dropped
damages claims on the eve of trial to avoid a jury of impartial fact
finders.

The most important of Chevron’s witness desaparecidos is
Beltman, a nationally-acclaimed scientist who in 2009 appeared in a 60 Minutes segment condemning
the company’s decades-long record of toxic dumping in Ecuador.

Last
Spring, Chevron secured an affidavit from
Beltman which the oil giant claimed shows he had “disavowed” his work
for the communities and recanted his comments to 60 Minutes. In April
2012, with much fanfare, Chevron issued a corporate press
release trumpeting Beltman’s supposed retreat. As usual, the company
failed to disclose key facts.

One of those facts is that Chevron had aimed a veritable bazooka at Beltman’s
head to get him to sign the affidavit. The company had named Beltman as a RICO defendant
and threatened to bankrupt Stratus if Beltman didn’t capitulate. Chevron
sent a series of shakedown
letters to clients of Stratus, falsely claiming that Beltman had been
found to have committed fraud.

The reality is that Beltman never changed his
opinion that Chevron is responsible for massive and life-threatening toxic contamination in Ecuador. Read this blog for
more on the back story of Chevron's campaign of economic extortion to
silence witnesses. Citing this evidence, 60 Minutes flat out refused
Chevron's bogus demand that it issue a "correction" to the original
story.

In
exchange for Beltman’s affidavit -- clearly written by Chevron lawyers
-- Chevron dropped Beltman and Stratus
as defendants in the RICO action. At the same time, Stratus agreed to
drop a lawsuit against Chevron where the consultancy had accused the oil
giant of engaging in a “an extrajudicial campaign of malicious
defamation.”
Read the Stratus
lawsuit to get a sense of how vicious Chevron’s strategy had become.

The
reason Mastro chickened out with his key
witnesses is pretty simple. Beltman (and Maest) only “disavowed” their
work on a single technical report that the Ecuador court excluded as
evidence. Neither were involved in the more than 100 other
technical reports that the Ecuador court relied on to find Chevron
liable. In other words, the affidavits were a big non-event in terms of
the trial.

They
were a nice illustration of Chevron's venal tactics. Chevron did not
want the court nor journalists to hear Beltman’s truthful testimony, so
Mastro squelched it. Beltman’s real view of Chevron’s bad acts can be
seen in this power
point presentation he prepared in 2010. Or read his sworn
deposition testimony from 2011.

Nearly the exact same thing happened with
another of Chevron’s favorite witnesses, the American technical expert Dr.
Charles Calmbacher. On the first day of the RICO trial, Mastro said Calmbacher
was going to testify. But he also was a big no-show.

The reason: Calmbacher lied in a pre-trial deposition
about disavowing his own court-ordered technical reports prepared for the communities. In fact, the evidence shows that
Calmbacher found extensive toxic contamination at the former Chevron sites he
inspected and he turned on the communities out of spite over a fee dispute.
See pp. 53-55 of Donziger’s sworn witness
statement for the documentation.

Another
of Chevron's disappearing witnesses, the Ecuadorian
technical expert Fernando Reyes, signed a sworn affidavit earlier this
year that was trumpeted by the company's PR flaks. But in his pre-trial
deposition, Reyes undermined a key plank of Chevron’s fake narrative
by saying that it was normal in Ecuador for court-appointed experts to
work
closely with the parties. So Mastro, who ran the case like a public
relations campaign, silenced him too.

Other Chevron witnesses who were never called
to court also include two of Donziger’s former associates, Laura Garr and
Andrew Woods. What happened?

Chevron stood nothing to gain once it got the
public relations hit in opening arguments of falsely claiming the pair had turned on Donziger.
You can bet that if called to the witness stand, both
would have lauded Donziger for his commitment to his clients even if they
griped on occasion about his demanding management style. So they were told to stay away.

Chevron always has used the RICO case to
pre-package witness affidavits drafted by its own lawyers and then peddle them
to Judge Kaplan and the media. In fact, these ghostwritten affidavits were central only
to Chevron’s public relations strategy to distract attention from its
environmental crimes in Ecuador by “demonizing”
Donziger and his clients.

Once
the trial was on and the rubber had to meet the road,
Mastro shuddered at the thought that any of the pre-packaged testimony
might veer off-script. It's also why he abruptly aborted his
cross-examination of Donziger, who was making the self-annointed former
"mob prosecutor" look a bumbling fool who was lost in the weeds and
could not frame a question properly.

Several months ago, a reporter at American
Lawyer (Michael Goldhaber) declared the entire Ecuador case over after former
Ecuador Judge Alberto Guerra signed a sworn affidavit claiming that the
plaintiffs had bribed a sitting judge. Almost overnight, based on a
Chevron-drafted affidavit, Guerra became Godhaber’s new media sensation.

Unlike Beltman and Maest, Chevron had no
choice but to call Guerra to the stand. His claims were just too
important.

Under cross-examination, Guerra wilted.
He admitted he was a criminal who had fixed dozens of cases and that Chevron
was paying him (in
violation of federal law) vast sums of money for favorable testimony.
Guerra’s show trial performance was a hilarious illustration of just how
weak Chevron’s case really is. Read pp. 31-41 of this post-trial
brief to understand how Guerra’s testimony is riddled with lies,
inconsistencies, and constantly changing stories.

Guerra played Chevron for a fool, and Chevron played Goldhaber for a fool. And Mastro, a leader of a practice
group that has been consistently nailed by courts for engaging in unethical
litigation practices, keeps Chevron’s false hope alive while billing CEO
John Watson an estimated $400 million annually for services that have caused
nothing but more and more risk
for the company’s shareholders.

Chevron is now left with precious little of
long-term value for its huge investment in the RICO case. It still has
trial judge Lewis A. Kaplan as the sole “Decider” of the case (at least before
the appellate courts weigh in). But Kaplan is seriously lacking in
credibility due to his xenophobic
comments toward the Ecuadorians, his biased
promotion of Chevron’s cause, and his grandiose desire to serve
as a de facto appellate panel for the Ecuadorian judiciary.
Kaplan's expected decision in favor of Chevron will be laughed at by
enforcement courts around the world and has little chance of surviving
appeal in the United States.

Kaplan’s hyperactive efforts
to jump through tighter and tighter hoops to favor Chevron has been nothing
short of astonishing to the world legal community. See this
brief from international legal scholars, this
brief from New York University law professor Bert Neuborne, and this
post-trial brief in the RICO case to get a sense of the man’s
intellectual dishonesty and sheer arrogance.

John Keker, known as one of the most
formidable trial lawyers in the nation who counts Google among his many clients, said in his recent motion
to withdraw that Kaplan had allowed the RICO case to degenerate into a
“Dickensian farce” due to his mismanagement of the docket and his “implacable
hostility” toward Donziger, who has battled on behalf of the rainforest
communities for two decades.

Chevron has played a cynical game of carrot
& stick, manipulating witnesses with exorbitant payments (Guerra) or
ferocious personal and economic pressure (Beltman and Maest). Team Mastro
and the Lords running Chevron would never get away with it if the case were
before a judge who wasn’t clearly biased against the Ecuadorians and Donziger.

All of Chevron’s testigosdesaparecidos were
people
that the oil giant could not manipulate enough, compensate enough, or
intimidate enough to be sufficiently complicit with its vicious
intimidation
campaign against the rainforest communities. And while the oil giant
can apparently make witnesses lie, flip, or simply vanish, nothing can
make the company’s responsibility for suffering in Ecuador disappear.

In addition to decrying the abusive nature of Chevron's scorched earth legal, political, and media strategy in the case, it warns of the significant negative implications of Chevron's efforts to evade accountability for its devastation in the Amazon:

"The people of
Ecuador have a right to defend their families from oil industry
pollution. Journalists have a right to expose the reckless practices
that are destroying Amazon communities and ecosystems. Chevron's
bullying tactics undermine those rights, and the Sierra Club supports
the individuals and organizations that are standing up to Chevron's
irresponsible corporate behavior."

Under headers highlighting some of the tactics Chevron has employed in an effort to evade accountability for its crimes in Ecuador, the letter outlines the way Chevron 'Attacks Free Speech,' 'Vilifies Critics,' and 'Undermines the System of Justice and Judicial Sovereignty.'

Under this last header, the letter explains:

In a threat to the nature of national sovereignty and an independent judiciary, Chevron took the unprecedented step of attempting to use an obscure arbitration procedure under the mantle of the U.S.-Ecuador Bilateral Investment Treaty to nullify the ruling of a sovereign domestic court even though Ecuador was Chevron’s chosen forum. This despite the fact that Ecuador was not even party to the 19-year court case as the plaintiffs were the 30,000 affected indigenous and campesino people, and the case itself began before the Investment Treaty was even signed. The affected peoples have no right to participate in the arbitration, which will be decided by three private lawyers, who purport to have the authority to overrule the Ecuadorian courts – raising threats to the sovereignty of justice systems around the world, which could be rendered powerless in the face of truly unlimited corporate power.

The dozen current signatories to the letter are currently circulating the letter, soliciting additional signatories, and conducting outreach to educate allies and colleagues working on human rights, environmental sustainability, and corporate accountability, among other key issues for which Chevron's tactics have profound implications.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Now that the evidentiary phase of Chevron’s retaliatory
RICO bench trial against New York human rights lawyer Steven
Donziger and his Ecuadorian clients is over, we can take
a deep breath and analyze what really happened before the controversial Judge
Lewis A. Kaplan. The answer is not much, other than one of the greatest abuses of the American civil justice system ever.

First, let’s take a step back and look at what is
undisputed. As Paul Paz y Mino of Amazon Watch wrote in his recent post
at Eye on the
Amazon blog, Chevron admits
to dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste into Ecuador’s Amazon when it
operated in the country from 1964 to 1992 under the Texaco brand. A trial
court decision finding Chevron liable for this dumping has been affirmed unanimously by Ecuador’s Supreme
Court. Since Chevron refuses to pay, judgment enforcement actions filed
by the villagers continue to target billions of dollars of Chevron assets in
Canada, Argentina, and Brazil. Chevron is also hamstrung by its
longstanding promise to U.S. courts to pay the $9.5 billion Ecuador judgment as
a condition of the dispute being moved to the South American nation in 2002.

For these and other reasons, we always have maintained
that the RICO trial was more an expensive therapy session for Chevron’s
management team than a bona fide legal case. None of the key Ecuadorians
named by Chevron as “defendants” even showed up. Given the bias of Judge Kaplan and the utter arrogance
in the idea that a U.S. judge could rule on issues in the case already decided by
Ecuador’s Supreme Court, Chevron is likely to
face a ferocious backlash from foreign judges if it tries to peddle Kaplan’s
ruling abroad.

Chevron’s fundamental allegation was that it was treated
unfairly during the trial. That’s typical public relations blah-blah
carted out after an oil company loses a trial fair and square.
Chevron fought for ten years to move the underlying environmental case from the
U.S. (where it was filed in 1993) to Ecuador. The company submitted 14 sworn affidavits to a U.S. federal court
praising the fairness of Ecuador’s courts.
(It started attacking those courts only when the evidence at the trial
pointed to its guilt.) Chevron recently won two significant legal cases in Ecuador
against the state-owned oil company, PetroEcuador. The Ecuador Supreme Court just last month lowered the company’s
liability by approximately $10 billion, a draconian result for the
long-suffering rainforest communities who have been waiting almost 50 years for
a clean-up. That hardly sounds like the fix was in.

The RICO case is the most recent installment of
Chevron’s global forum shopping to evade accountability for its toxic dumping.
The company has filed thousands of motions in more than 30 U.S. courts to try
to undermine the Ecuador judgment. It also filed two claims against
Ecuador’s government in a futile attempt to shift its own clean-up
responsibility to Ecuadorian taxpayers.
It has attacked more than 100 supporters of the Ecuadorians, including
bloggers and activists, with subpoenas seeking their private communications.
It has dispatched powerful lobbyists, including former Clinton Administration
officials Mack McLarty and Mickey Kantor, to pressure the U.S. government to
cancel trade benefits for Ecuador. It also has hired six public relations
firms to promote the fake narrative that the nation’s third largest oil company
is being victimized by indigenous groups who lived mired in its oil
contamination. An internal Chevron memo from 2009 acknowledged the
company’s long-term strategy for Ecuador was to “demonize Donziger” and turn
the tables on the villagers rather than litigate the case on the merits.
That’s the context for the RICO case.

Chevron wanted the underlying claims to be heard in
Ecuador as long it felt it could engineer its desired outcome. In October
2003, company lawyer Ricardo Reis Veiga desperately tried to torpedo the
litigation on the first day of trial by persuading the country’s Attorney
General to do something entirely unethical and illegal – call the trial judge to
urge him to throw out the case that Chevron said it would litigate in
Ecuador. Once judges in Ecuador began to resist Chevron’s pressure
campaign, the company high-tailed it back to the friendly confines of Judge
Kaplan’s courtroom where the activist judge was more than happy to grant a do-over. Almost everybody
expects Judge Kaplan, who does not even speak Spanish, to rule in favor of
Chevron based on his interpretation of Ecuadorian laws already decided by that
country’s highest court.

The RICO case remains a sideshow that Chevron is using
to try to distract its shareholders and employees from evidence of its crimes,
fraud, and human rights abuses in Ecuador – as documented in this stunning affidavit by Ecuadorian lawyer Juan
Pablo Saenz or in this
video or in this interview with Donziger
on his website. But it is a stretch to think that any Kaplan
ruling in favor of the oil giant will matter to the foreign enforcement courts
who will decide under their own laws whether Chevron pays up. (By the way, Chevron can raise as a defense all
of its so-called “fraud” evidence that it is using during the RICO trial in the
enforcement courts.)

Chevron’s trial of mass distraction before Kaplan also
poses a different kind of threat to our body politic in the U.S. As Paz
eloquently wrote in his blog:

Unfortunately, there's even more going on here than a
Chevron-friendly judge misusing his power to the detriment of 30,000
long-suffering people in Ecuador. This is the furthering of a strategy that
corporations will continue to develop to crush
the free speech of critics and limit our
chances to fight back on anything resembling a level playing field. This RICO
suit and everything Kaplan has allowed Chevron to get away with in its wake is
a serious threat to open society and due process of law.

In our recent analysis, Chevron’s RICO
Trial to Nowhere, we noted eight specific reasons
why Chevron’s case has little or no chance of holding up on appeal in the
U.S. Besides the fundamental problem that Chevron failed to prove its case,
there is also simply no remedy that any U.S. court can conceivably fashion to
block a foreign court judgment. When there’s no conceivable remedy,
there’s no “case or controversy” as required by the U.S. Constitution.
And when there’s no case or controversy, there should be no trial.

You won’t be hearing about the flaws in Chevron’s case
from R. Hewitt Pate, the company’s general counsel. With an air of
smugness, Pate sat in Kaplan’s courtroom for six weeks while collecting some of
his $7.5 million annual salary. After strong-arming Chevron to invest astonishing
sums in the RICO case, he no doubt wanted to be the man to spin the daily
results to Chevron’s Board of Directors and CEO John Watson. (Watson, who
oversaw Chevron’s purchase of Texaco without adequately vetting Texaco’s
pending Ecuador liability, has long been the target of shareholder ire over his mishandling
of the litigation.)

Pate’s effort to control the narrative before Chevron’s
Board and shareholders has to be pure jiu-jitsu. Here is a thumbnail
sketch of Chevron’s legal problems with the RICO case:

Kaplan has no remedy to help Chevron: Having denied a jury trial and excluded key relevant
evidence that contradicts Chevron’s narrative, Kaplan will no doubt “find” in
favor of the company. But once that happens, there is no place to
go. Under RICO, a private party like Chevron has no right to injunctive
relief – a position the U.S. Department of Justice under the Bush
Administration repeatedly asserted. Few judges would have the temerity to
even think they could allow a law passed by Congress to bring down the Mafia to
be twisted by a corporation to attack indigenous
groups and human rights lawyers who held it accountable for its crimes. That’s a rather scary assault on the very nature of political advocacy. The Second
Circuit Court of Appeals in New York already ruled in 2012 that the Ecuador
rainforest communities “may seek to enforce their judgment in any country in the
world where Chevron has assets.” Nothing that Judge Kaplan does can change that.

Kaplan cannot act as the appellate court for
Ecuador’s judiciary: It is an axiom of
international law that judges in one country are not allowed to overrule court
decisions of another country. In Ecuador, three layers of courts – most
recently the nation’s highest court – have upheld the trial court decision
holding Chevron liable for dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste into the
Amazon. Judge Kaplan knows almost nothing about Ecuador; he cannot
even read the trial court decision or the record on which it was based.
Yet Judge Kaplan has suggested that he plans to rule on the validity of
Ecuador’s entire judicial system as part of his grand plan. Doing so will
look plain silly to the appeals court and even sillier to foreign judges being
asked to enforce the Ecuador judgment.

Kaplan manipulated evidentiary decisions: Even after denying him a jury, Judge Kaplan would not
let Donziger mount a real defense. He
refused to admit evidence of the extensive contamination relied on by the
Ecuador court to find Chevron liable. He excluded more than 100 technical
reports from Chevron and other sources that documented high levels of Total
Petroleum Hydrocarbons and other harmful toxins (such as lead, barium, zinc,
and Chromium 6) at the company’s 376 former well sites. This evidence was
critical to show the Ecuador judgment was valid and not procured by fraud, as
Chevron claims. Judge Kaplan also
refused to hear evidence of Chevron’s “unclean hands” – its crimes, fraud, and
threats to judges and court personnel to sabotage the trial. It is a
basic legal principle dating back centuries that the party that arrives in
court with “unclean hands” is not entitled to relief. To deal with this
problem, Judge Kaplan whitewashed the official record by excluding the
extensive evidence of Chevron’s “unclean hands”.

Kaplan’s temperament is not befitting a federal judge: We have reported extensively on Kaplan’s displays of
bias against Donziger and the Ecuadorians, including his comments from the
bench disparaging Ecuador’s judicial system and his preposterous claim that
Donziger’s goal is “to fix the balance of payments deficit” of the United
States. See here, here, and here. During the trial, Judge Kaplan
treated several witnesses from Ecuador with a conspicuous rudeness –
threatening one with contempt if he did not turn over his computer to Chevron,
using trick questions on another, and dismissing complaints about cultural
insensitivity. Letting Chevron get away with its final act of trickery – dropping
$60 billion in money damages claims on the eve of trial – was the ultimate betrayal of his oath to administer justice fairly. That allowed Chevron to avoid a jury of
impartial fact finders, which very likely would have meant another devastating
courtroom setback for the company.
Kaplan then heaped insult upon injury by letting Chevron’s staff use the
jury deliberation room as a private office during the trial. Dropping a
jury also means Chevron is going to be hampered by a decision from a judge with
little credibility domestically and no legitimacy internationally.

Aside from the many legal problems, on the factual front
Chevron’s case is a paper tiger.

Once you strip away the flotsam, the company’s supposed
evidence of “racketeering” boils down to two main allegations: (1) that
the Ecuador judge was bribed so that the plaintiffs could “ghostwrite” his
decision; and (2) that a particular expert damages report submitted by Richard
Cabrera was fraudulent. On both points, Chevron’s allegations fall apart upon
even superficial examination.

Testimony from Chevron’s lying judge, Alberto Guerra: Guerra is an admitted liar who testified that he accepted as
little as $200 to fix cases. Chevron paid at least $326,000 in cash and
other benefits for his testimony, in violation of U.S. law that prohibits
payments to witnesses. Chevron also hired Ira Kurzban, one of
America’s most well-connected immigration attorneys, to help secure political
asylum for Guerra and his family even though Guerra faces no threat in Ecuador
other than prosecution for his admitted crimes. In exchange for Chevron’s
money, Guerra offered a triple hearsay statement that the Ecuadorian lawyers
bribed the judge – a charge denied by the judge himself. (Donziger never
even met the judge nor saw him before he testified in Kaplan’s court.)
For more detail, see Donziger’s motion to strike Guerra’s testimony and this blog by Paul Paz. Bottom
line: Guerra is another in a long line of Chevron witnesses bribed by the
company to lie.

Ghostwriting:
Chevron’s allegation that the 188-page trial court judgment was not written by
Zambrano is a joke. Chevron’s two main experts on “ghostwriting” –
Hofstra professor Robert Leonard and 28-year-old tech whiz kid Spencer Lynch –
both failed to undertake the much-vaunted “authorship analysis” that could have
compared Zambrano’s judgment with his other publicly available decisions or
writings to determine if they matched up. The fact that Chevron did
not produce such a report is telling. Chevron likely did commission the study,
but buried it when it did not turn out how the company had hoped.

The Cabrera damages report: One of 106 expert technical reports submitted into evidence,
the Cabrera report was prepared in conformity with Ecuadorian law using the
same methods Chevron’s lawyers used for the preparation of their expert
reports. (See pp. 46-53 of Donziger’s sworn
witness statement for a deconstruction
of Chevron’s fraudulent narrative regarding Cabrera.) In any event,
the Ecuador court did not rely on the Cabrera report when finding Chevron
liable. Instead, the court relied largely on scientific evidence of
contamination proffered by Chevron’s own experts (such as Ernesto Baca and Gino
Bianchi), as Donziger explains in paragraphs 46 and 47 of his witness
statement. The fact that Chevron’s own evidence proved the case against
it was reinforced by an independent study conducted by the Louis
Berger Group in the United States.

Other Chevron “evidence” of racketeering is even more
absurd. The fact that Donziger was an aggressive promoter of press
releases exposed Chevron’s human rights abuses and corruption in Ecuador
is basic political advocacy protected by the First Amendment. These tools
of advocacy have been used by lawyers from Thurgood Marshall to Ralph Nader to
Hew Pate himself, who loves to put out press releasesthat dupe his own shareholders. Similarly, Donziger’s suggestion that two
Chevron lawyers in Ecuador be criminally prosecuted for engaging in a sham
remediation was entirely proper. Click here to read about how Chevron dropped a key
plank of its RICO case to avoid the airing of evidence that would have proven
the fraudulent nature of its so-called “remediation” in Ecuador.

Chevron of course will try to promote Kaplan’s decision
far and wide. The fact Chevron repeatedly tried to corrupt the Ecuador
proceedings and manipulate the RICO evidence will not be mentioned by the oil
giant. Meanwhile, it’s business as usual in San Ramon and Lago Agrio. The indigenous uprising of the "so-called plaintiffs" in Ecuador is gaining ground around the world while the beleaguered Watson-Pate team digs in its heels.

Chevron needs to keep its corporate jets gassed and have its pilots at the ready. Pate and his entourage should keep their travel bags packed and ice skates sharpened. This battle is spreading.

Monday, December 9, 2013

Yesterday, the Huffington Post picked up a post originally published on Amazon Watch's Eye on the Amazon blog, written by Paul Paz y Miño, who spent a few weeks in Judge Kaplan's courtroom following Chevron's retaliatory RICO lawsuit against Steven Donziger and the Ecuadorian villagers who won a historic judgment again the oil giant for its contamination in Ecuador's rainforest.

Paz y Miño's post is a powerful indictment of the so-called testimony of disgraced former judge Alberto Guerra, who was Chevron's star witness during the trial. Read the post below or check it out on The Huffington Post.

Having virtually all the money in the world often means you can buy
silence, you can buy time, and you can buy lies. Chevron has
demonstrated this time and again in its decades-long battle to evade
accountability for deliberately dumping 18 billion gallons of toxic
wastewater into the Ecuadorian Amazon.

The problem is that this time what Chevron has bought is a bag of lies
in the form of false testimony from a thoroughly disreputable source,
and they aren't able to hide the price tag. In the ongoing saga of Chevron's scorched earth legal strategy, last week disgraced former judge Alberto Guerra
testified in support of the company's most explosive allegations – that
the judgment against Chevron was ghostwritten by the plaintiffs and
that his efforts to seek bribes were partly on behalf of Judge Nicolas
Zambrano, who issued the historic $19 billion final judgment in the
Ecuadorian environmental litigation.

Somehow, Chevron expects the court (and the public) to believe that a
man who has admitted to fixing cases and accepting bribes throughout his
career as a lawyer and a judge is being honest this time, despite
receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from Chevron for his
testimony. And everything depends upon his word, as the supporting
"evidence" that he's presented is laughably incomplete (he claims that
his computer died, and that's why he has essentially nothing to back up
his story). For months Guerra worked with Chevron to prepare his
testimony – and yet it was STILL full of gaping holes and
contradictions. Amazon Watch was there in court and couldn't help
wondering how anyone could take Guerra seriously. Of course, there's no
jury in this trial – something Chevron worked very hard to guarantee –
just a wall of stone-faced lawyers whose fat paychecks depend upon Judge
Kaplan accepting Guerra's testimony as credible (or at least
convenient).

These unethical maneuvers have not gone unnoticed by the legal
community. Erwin Chemerinsky, a noted legal scholar and dean of the
University of California Irvine School of Law stated:

"That Chevron and its counsel have crossed the line here cannot
seriously be debated. If a party or its counsel were permitted to pay a
testifying witness for physical evidence, beyond the reasonable value of
that evidence, and to pay the witness a salary in exchange for an
agreement to testify, there would be little left of the rule against
compensating fact witnesses. That is precisely what has occurred here."

The Ecuadorians have now moved that all of Guerra's fraudulent testimony be stricken.
Remember, this was the best Chevron could do on this case. They know
that they can't discuss the abundant evidence of their misdeeds – it
still sits in toxic pools by the hundreds in Ecuador – so they've pinned
their feeble accusations of a sinister conspiracy on claims of a
corrupt legal process. I think they have managed to uncover some
corruption, however. So when will Chevron and their legal team be
brought before a court to answer for paying a confessed charlatan to
commit perjury?